Three-Dimensional Visualization of Blood and Lymphatic Vessels in the Adult Zebrafish Heart by Chemical Clearing

Unlike humans, the zebrafish can repair and regenerate its heart following injury. Understanding the molecular and physiological mechanisms of heart regeneration is critical in developing pro-regenerative strategies for clinical application. The cardiac lymphatic and non-lymphatic vasculature both respond to injury in zebrafish and are instrumental in driving optimal repair and regeneration. However, progress has been impeded by an inability to obtain high resolution images to clearly visualize and thus to fully understand the vascular responses in the injured heart and how this might intersect with successful repair and regeneration in humans.In this chapter, we describe a chemical clearing approach using Clear Unobstructed Brain/Body Imaging Cocktails and Computational analysis (CUBIC), for obtaining high resolution images of the adult zebrafish heart. This approach permits three-dimensional reconstruction of cardiac vasculature throughout the entire organ. By applying CUBIC methodology to tissues from transgenic zebrafish reporter lines or in conjunction with immunofluorescent staining, optical slices can be be generated, negating the need for standard tissue processing and sectioning procedures and yielding higher resolution images. The resultant images enable a holistic view of the coronary blood and lymphatic vasculature during heart injury and regeneration. Herein, we describe our protocol for visualizing vessels in the adult zebrafish heart using these approaches.